ne carved upon it. Then I saw that this was but one of a
sisterhood--the mother-tree fallen. Across were oaks and hickories, and
through the naked branches, a log cabin.

An enumeration will not even suggest the picture. Sheep and cattle had
made it a grove of the earth-gods. We remembered the Spring by the
cabin, and crossed to it. Skimming the leaves from the basin, we watched
it fill with that easy purity of undisturbed Nature.... Now there was a
fine blowing rain in our faces, and the smell of the woods itself in the
moist air was a Presence. The cabin had been built for many
decades--built of white oak, hewn, morticed and tenoned. The roof and
floor was gone, but the walls needed only chinking. They were founded
upon boulders.... I saw in days to come a pair of windows opening to the
north, and a big open fireplace on the east wall, a new floor and a new
roof.... It would be a temple. I saw young men and children coming
there in the long years ahead.... Across the open field beyond was a
forest.

"The big beeches are there," the Abbot said.

"It can't be so perfect as this," I declared.

"It is different. This is a grove--thinned for pasture land. Over there
it is a forest of beech. To the west is a second growth of
woods--everything small but thick. You can see and take things right in
your hand----"

We did not go to the forest nor to the jungle that day, but moved about
the rim of that delved pasture-land, watching the creek from different
angles, studying the trees without their insignia. We knew the main
timbers only--beech, oak, elm, maple and hickory and ash, blue beech and
ironwood and hawthorn. There were others that I did not know, and the
Abbot seemed disturbed that he could not always help.

"It won't be so another Spring," he said.

Altogether it hushed us. I was holding the picture of the temple of the
future years--for those to come, especially for the young ones, who were
torn and wanted to find themselves for a time.

"You say he is not going to cut anything from the pasture-grove?" I
repeated.

"No."

There was ease in that again. We walked back with the falling
dusk--across a winter wheat field that lay in water like rice. The town
came closer, and we smelled it. The cold mist in the air livened every
odour. It is a clean little town as towns go, but we knew very well what
the animals get from us.... I was thinking also what a Chinese once said
to me in Newchwang. He had travelled in